Page 18 RAIN August/September 1981 by John Ferrell and Laura Stuc_hinsky Well I listened to my mother and I joined a typing pool I listened to my lover and I put him through his school If I listen to the boss I'm just a bloody fool And an underpaid engineer I've been a sucker ever since I was a baby As a daughter, as a lover, as a mother, as a dear But I'll fight' em as a woman, not a lady I'll fight ·' em as an engineer. -Peggy Seeger When we received a copy of The Next Whole Earth Catalog some months back, we were pleased to note that their favorable access of RAIN included a book review by Gail Katz as an example of what we do. Of course we weren't surprised. Gail's reviews of the latest and the best books in the areas of engineering, architecture, and building have been an important feature of RAIN for nearly two years now. Gail works as a mechanical and electrical engineer for a · Portland firm, and her other talents range across a broad spectrum. In addition to her volunteer contributions to RAIN, she has been active with Portland's local theater companies, working in design and construction. She has also been active in Responsible Urban Neighborhood Technology (RUNT), the group which is putting together Portland's version of the Integral Urban If ouse. In our relationship with Gail, we at RAIN have been intrigued by her descriptions of what it is like to work in a profession that is dominated by men and partial to visions of technology that are seldom appropriate. We found,her story engaging and wanted to share it with you. "How did you ever get into ~ngineering?" someone opce asked Gail Katz. "Was your father an engineer?" "No;" replied Gail, "my mother was." During World War II Gail's mom was an engineer working on TransWorld Airways' wind tunnel testing program. While Gail maintains that having such an example in the family did not influence her career choice, its apparent that she and her two sisters (one is a lawyer and the other a programmer with a Ph.D. in Chemistry) were pos:itively affected by their mother's experience. ("She told us it was one of the most exciting times in her life.") Gail grew up in New York City and moved to Berkeley, California in 1969, when she was in her early 20's. There she got a job as a cab driver and frequent mechanic. She loved it. It allowed her to meet some of Berkeley's more bizarre people. "My favorite shift," she says, "was four ~n the afternoon to two in the morning." Eventually she moved on to Berkeley's Whole Earth Access Co. where she worked in the hardware department. The building experience she's acquired through odd jogs and a background in math and physics enabled her to function as the store's technical person. After a year she grew restless: "rather than just selling the tools to • p,eople who were doing things, I wanted to do them myself." After a brief and unsatisfying $ojourn at architecture school in New Mexico ("people were mostly learning to say 'I'm a professional and I Her engineering instructor asked if she -' were in the right room. When she insisted she was he asked Ii can you bake?" \ know this better than you'"), she moved to Portland and gave the Engineering Department at Portland State University a try. An early indicator of how things would be in the engineering world surfaced in one of Gail's first classes: her instructor asked her if she was in the right robm. When she insisted that she was, he asked about her educational bas:kground. She told him about the chemistry and physics she'd studied. "Then he asked 'can you bake?' I said, 'well I've always been too busy fixing cars and building houses to bother to learn.' He didn't have a comeback for that one." Not all instructors were as insensitive, but even those with good.
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